By John J Bowen
Astonishing as it is some companies make it very hard to buy from them, and we solo professionals can benefit here in two ways; firstly we can learn from their mistakes and improve our own sales options, but we can also earn from helping some of these businesses.
Buying on line shows up the worst of this for me, so some examples:
- Crude product search engines that give you almost the entire inventory regardless of what you ask for.
- Page links that don't work.
- Where you view the product, select a quantity to buy, get through a convoluted checkout process and only then get told that it is out of stock.
- Convoluted checkout process.
- Contact Us links that don't work.
- Drop down lists in the Contact Us section that never seem to cover the query type that I have.
- Comment boxes that only allow too few characters for your query
I understand that you need to have a set of processes to enable your company to run, and some of these will be around ordering, pick, pack, and dispatch and customer enquiries. This is a particular area of my own expertise, but why do you inflict this stuff on the customer?
Some company web sites are great; Amazon for example, but others are dreadful. Amazon relieves me of a lot of my disposable cash because they make it easy for me to spend with them and the overall customer experience is great. But on the other hand there are at least two or three companies a month that fail to extract funds from me because I can't be bothered to go through all the hassle. Do people at these companies ever consider the customer experience? Do they ever try to buy from themselves? Somehow I doubt it.
And it isn't just web sites. A lot of face to face experiences are no better. Two big gripes here; firstly the assistant who has to finish talking to their colleague when you've obviously arrived, and are waiting, to ask a question, and those places where you can't enjoy looking without assistant after assistant walking up and asking if you need help.
For solo professionals we are often in the situation where cash flow can be an issue and I am often in the position where it will be around 90 days before some major corporate clients settle their bill. I put up with it because they pay good rates, give me interesting work and my involvement with them leads me to other good contacts and contracts, but I also have a number of other clients where they pay much more quickly and often in advance.
Having the ability to receive payments through bank transfer and credit card makes a lot of sense and whilst the former is often free or attracts only a small charge, the latter need not be expensive, for if you can be paid promptly a three to four per cent charge represents good value when compared with the time it takes to chase. Many organisations devolve certain levels of expenditure to corporate purchasing card holders and this can significantly reduce your debtor days.
Making it easy for people to pay you is not hard, and the key is to discuss how they would like to pay up front. If they would like to pay by card, then that's great, and if they need to be invoiced then check how the payment process works; often if the client contact doesn't know a call to the accounts people will establish how you can be set up as a vendor. They are grateful to have someone be proactive as it saves them time too, and if you can get yourself a vendor number issued before your first invoice goes in then you have a good possibility of getting paid more promptly.
Make it easy for people to pay you and they are much more likely to spend their money with you that with someone else.
